Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

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I came here just to say the same thing — Apple really needs to track the statistics on success rate for text selection ...

“User Selected the text they wanted first try”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 30 seconds”

“User Selected the text they wanted within 1 minute”

“User Failed to select the text they wanted”

I hit that last case probably more than 30% of the time nowadays — and very often it’s not because the text representation on screen makes it impossible — but because it’s just fucking horrifically bad ui and I can’t select the text I’m interested it despite trying for frustratingly long amount of time. I hit categories 2 and 3 frequently when I really need to get the data selected — and that makes me want to throw my Apple iPhone into the sun ...

Maybe it’s because idiots don’t know/care about selecting text to begin with and their products are more and more targeted to them, as opposed to people why (try to) do real work on their devices as opposed to scrolling social media?

I don’t know many people who would be unable to derive value from the use of text selection on their mobile device - that should be a low percentage of the market, because everyone should be succeeding at using the functionality ...?

In my experience a lot of non-tech people struggle to use it or are not even aware of what the feature is for and consider it an annoyance.

What I find sad is that computers used to be too complicated for the masses but those who learned could be very productive as the tools were relatively advanced and well thought out so you'd expect that given enough time everyone would become comfortable using these tools and computer literacy would become a basic skill akin to reading & writing. Instead, it seems like we're going the other way, instead of expecting people to learn, we're intentionally dumbing down the tools at the expense of productivity. It used to be that if you invested time to learn how to be proficient with the tools you'd be rewarded with being extremely productive. Nowadays power-user features are disappearing and we're back to the lowest common denominator, up to the point where they're screwing up basic text-editing features.

Can't wait until they remove keyboards completely because "they're too complicated". /s

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